‘IF you could sit down on a park bench for half an hour and have a chat with anybody at all, who would you choose?’

This is a message that often comes up, unbidden, on my Facebook page because a friend has posted their own answer to that question.

Always, the person they most want to talk to is a loved one who has died. This reminder of my own loss delivers a swift emotional punch that makes me gasp for air.

So, every time I see that post doing the rounds, I take a breath and I scroll on by.

Some people, I am sure, are helped by the opportunity to name the person they miss so much in public and on social media. I, though, don’t want to be blind-sided by what is a potent trigger for grief that can make me lose my step.

Should that post carry a ‘trigger’ warning? Of course not. And yet we live in a time where universities are putting health warnings on or even banning books and content which somebody in charge has decided are ‘offensive’ or liable to distress.

More and more often, a newscaster will pre-empt a report with the phrase ‘some people may find the following news-item upsetting.’ This begs the question ‘what is the news for?’

Surely, if something upsetting has happened, the media should not hold back from reporting ‘the what and the when’ in order that we the public can then be informed enough to discuss ‘the why and the what next’. (I already have tinnitus and warning bells are now going off very loudly in my head at this point!)

Across much of society it seems that there is an infantilisation attempt going on where the powers that be turn us all back into children to be pacified, comforted and told what to do and how to feel.

The most absurd example recently, so absurd I think my head is actually rotating, is Northampton University’s decision to issue a trigger warning against George Orwell’s political masterpiece ‘1984’.

Yes, they are worried that the very novel that warns about censorship, tyranny, control and abuse by governments is too traumatic to be read without a warning. (Satire is officially dead now).

In this novel, published in 1949, Orwell forecasts a future where not only information is controlled but thoughts are no longer private.

In his novel, you can be punished for having the ‘wrong opinions’ and committing ‘thought-crimes’.

The reality programme ‘Big Brother’ was so named because of Orwell’s novel where the public are reminded of their constant surveillance by the state with the terrifying phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’.

It was the Mail on Sunday that broke this story after submitting a Freedom of Information request. In the continued story of ‘my world’s gone mad’, I am very grateful to this Brexit- supporting right-wing newspaper for setting its journalists onto the topic of censorship.

The paper earlier this month reported that in Salford University, ‘English literature undergraduates are warned of ‘scenes and discussions of violence and sexual violence in several of the primary texts’ that they may find ‘distressing’. Well that’s Shakespeare off the reading list then!

If we prevent people experiencing something that may trigger a strong negative emotion, we are creating drones – worker bees who plod off to their jobs and never question anything.

I’m just hoping that PM Boris Johnson, the Queen Bee in my analogy here, will buzz off soon and will be replaced by somebody who will stand up for freedom of thought, speech and reading!